


The Nice List

by RobotSquid



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Christmas, M/M, Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 15:35:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17124038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobotSquid/pseuds/RobotSquid
Summary: Sometimes new Christmas traditions just happen all on their own.A Banana Fish Secret Santa fic for sunoumatsu on twitter!  Happy Holidays friend! <3





	The Nice List

The first Christmas they spend together is in Japan.  Ash hadn’t even realized how close it was until he sees the first decorations in the corner store.

“You have Christmas here?” he asks as Eiji is picking out ingredients for dinner.  If Ash had his way, he’d stay at home and study Japanese on his own.  But Eiji insists on taking him out with him, where Eiji can keep an eye on him, and Ash can get more immersive practice with the language.

Ash doesn’t want to admit it just yet, but he doesn’t like being left alone.  They’re staying with Eiji’s parents for now until they can find a place of their own, but Ash can’t communicate with either of them.  They’re nice enough, but left alone without Eiji, it seems that Ash and Eiji’s parents don’t yet know what to make of each other.  When Eiji’s not at home, Ash might as well be all alone.

“Of course we do,” Eiji replies.  “Didn’t I tell you before?”

“Yeah, you said it was a holiday for lovers,” Ash teases, leaning down into Eiji’s face and grinning.

Eiji, predictably, goes red, and he frowns.  “It can be a regular holiday too.”  He turns away and tries to compose himself.  “We should do something special for your first Christmas with my family.”

“There’s no need to do that.”  Ash starts looking over where the store has stocked toys and other holiday decorations.  There’s a little stuffed bird on the shelf wearing a Santa hat and holding a little felt present between its outstretched wings.  He wanders away from Eiji towards the toys and picks up the little bird.  He tries to read the sign.  He recognizes “bird”, and figures that must mean he’s making good progress.

He senses Eiji coming up behind him.  “What are you looking at?”

“This ugly little bird,” Ash says, picking up the toy.  “Kinda hideous, isn’t it?”

“It’s not that ugly.”  Eiji takes the bird from him.  “Look, he’s got a present for you.”  Eiji pushes the bird into Ash’s face and teases:  “Have you been a good boy this year, Ash?”

Ash smirks.  “Yeah right.  Do I look like I’ve ever been on the ‘nice’ list?”

“You are nice,” Eiji insists, tossing the toy into his basket.

“Oh come on, don’t buy that thing.”

“What thing?”  Eiji cocks an eyebrow at him.  “I didn’t do anything.”

Ash blinks at him, trying with all his might not to smile.

 

On Christmas morning, Ash awakens in their room to find Eiji’s bed empty.  He can hear muffled Japanese drifting in through the door, and he can smell the cooking that’s come to be so familiar in the Okumura household.

For a while, he just lays there, paralyzed.  What would they expect of him today?  Would they want him to do Christmas stuff?  Ash hadn’t celebrated Christmas since he was a kid, save for the one year Shorter forced him to eat a whole feast of his crappy cooking.  It felt like a fake holiday, something that existed on the other side of a wall.  Would Ash even be able to go out there and pretend to be happy?  Sitting in a room of people he didn’t know who were speaking a language he didn’t understand?

He makes up his mind.  He’ll tell Eiji that he doesn’t feel well, to not worry about him, to spend the day with his family.

Almost as soon as he thinks it, there’s a knock at the door.  Eiji walks in, creeps over to the bed where Ash is pretending to still be asleep, and sits down on the mattress.

“Ash,” he says, in a soft sing-song tone.  Ash feels the warmth of Eiji’s hand on his shoulder, and he shudders, giving himself away.  “Are you awake?”

Ash sighs and rolls over.  Eiji is beaming widely down at him, holding a little red present tied with a green bow.  “It’s Christmas,” Eiji says.  “I got you something.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” Ash replies.  All he wants to do right now is wrap Eiji up in his arms and pull him down to go back to sleep.  He isn’t up to this.  Christmas was never for him.  He doesn’t deserve Eiji’s family and Eiji’s kindness and Eiji’s presents.  Ash’s presence is only complicating things for all of them.

“Yes I did,” Eiji insists.  He sets the little box, no bigger than a softball, directly atop Ash’s face.  Ash suppresses a laugh as he takes the box in one hand and forces himself to sit up.

“Fine, fine,” he grumbles.  He unwraps the present, wishing Eiji wasn’t looking at him so expectantly, wondering what Eiji wants his reaction to be.

But before he can worry about it too much, he sees the ugly stuffed bird from the grocery store, holding out its cheaply made little felt gift, smiling lopsided up at him from inside the box.

“What the hell…?” he asks.

“You’ve been good this year,” Eiji says with a wide smile.  “So you get presents.  I spoke with Santa personally:  he says that you’ve been on the nice list every single year, you just didn’t have a tree to put your presents under so he couldn’t get them to you.”

Ash can’t help but smile a little even as he looks away.  “I’m not a little kid, Eiji.”

“Yeah you are, little bro,” Eiji says, grabbing Ash’s hand and pulling him up out of bed.  “Get dressed.”

When Ash finally allows himself to be brought into the living room, he is greeted with enthusiasm by Eiji’s family, all of them speaking what English they knew to tell him that they had a surprise.

Ash lets himself be brought over to their tiny Christmas tree, and he realizes slowly, as his eyes fill gently with overwhelmed tears, that every single present under the tree is for him.

 

They spend one more Christmas at Eiji’s parents’ house before they can move out into their own.  They stay close by; Eiji’s mother had learned some English for Ash’s sake, and they had practiced together for the last year.  Ash feels a connection to her that he can’t articulate very well to her in words, but he’s pretty sure that he knows.

During their first Christmas in their new home, Ash puts the ugly bird toy in the stocking he bought for Eiji.  Somehow, the toy has still held together even though it had cost about two dollars (or around two hundred yen, as Ash had to keep reminding himself) and looked like it would crumble into dust even that first day that they’d bought it.

 

Every year, the bird finds its way into their presents.  Sometimes Ash will hide it in the Christmas tree, sometimes Eiji will tuck it into Ash’s blanket on Christmas Eve for him to find first thing in the morning.  Miraculously, it survives everything.  It survives the year that their cat Skip mistook it for its own toy, it survives a trip back to New York to visit Sing, and it even survives the fateful day that the felt gift fell off and disappeared for good.  It survives being ripped and sewn back up, it survives accidentally going through the washer, and it reappears countless times when neither of them could remember where it was until only a few days before Christmas.

Ash still finds Christmas to be mostly a hassle, but the part that he loves most is spending it with Eiji.  After so many decades together, it feels like Eiji has finally been able to erase the bitterness that Ash felt about his lost childhood, all those years he watched parents and children shopping in Times Square, something that felt like a lie even as he saw it happening in front of him.  With Eiji, he’s finally allowed into that world, where lights and snow and peppermint candy let things feel a little bit better, a little more hopeful.

After a while, Ash starts to think that he might even say he likes Christmas.  The ugly bird lives on, just as the two of them do.


End file.
